


What Sam loves

by basaltgrrl



Category: Life on Mars (UK)
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-31
Updated: 2012-08-31
Packaged: 2017-11-14 07:02:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/512603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/basaltgrrl/pseuds/basaltgrrl





	What Sam loves

Sam doesn’t love gay sex.

It’s like—the first day in CID, when Gene grabbed his jacket and threw him against the filing cabinet, and suddenly his back was an erogenous zone, as if there were new nerve endings in his shoulder blades and in the skin of his chest where he could feel the imprint of Gene’s knuckles.  
He stammered for a response, “Who the hell are you?” The unspoken words, “and where have you been all my life?” occurred to him later, sitting alone in his shitty flat, staring at the stained ceiling, buzzing from the best wank he’d had in a very long time.

It made him think that 2006 had been gradually emasculating him, and that 1973 was like a Viagra for the soul. As if he had worn a full-body condom in the present day, and the past had stripped it off, leaving him raw and tingling. But it wasn’t that simple. It wasn’t that everything here, now, gave him the horn.

And there had been Annie’s fingers on his neck, probing gently until the moment she took control, all wide eyes and authority, and that kidney punch, god, he had been gasping from it but not just from the pain.

From the moment he had opened his eyes on the muddy sky of 1973 he had been buzzing, and it hadn’t stopped yet.

He likes gay sex, of course, but it’s not about the gender. He’s had bad experiences, with men and with women, so the quality was never about what sort of partner he was in bed with. And by bad he doesn’t mean abusive or physically painful, but sometimes the experience doesn’t touch some indefinable part of him. It’s complicated.

He hasn’t tried to explain it, to talk it though, to many people in his life. The times that he’s tried—well, he opened up too early, once, and she refused to answer his calls. He wised up after that. He taught himself not to expect too much, although he never stopped hoping, or yearning. There have been times when good stuff happened by accident, when his partner stumbled on the right thing at the right time, which almost made it worse when said partner didn’t really understand what it was they had done, why he had been so mad for it. And that makes him quiet.  
From his first day in 1973 he felt buzzed, felt an energy like electricity in his body. He didn’t know what it was, whether it was real or something having to do with the hospital in the future or just a hallucination. But when Gene threw him against the filing cabinet in his office all that energy pooled and coalesced and he knew what it meant. It meant he was going to spend a lot more time feeling a lot more alive. It meant, hopefully, that he was going to connect, not have to beat around the bush, feel free to get more in touch with his inner self or some such shite.

He wants to be out of his head. He wants to be pushed so far he’s not sure he’ll get back. It doesn’t have to be rough (although that doesn’t hurt) but it does have to be very, very serious. And by serious he means… well, it depends, doesn’t it? It’s not the sort of thing you can write a list for. It’s about feeling.

He wants to be crushed and torn open. He wants to be possessed. He wants to be able to ask for anything.

For all that Gene gives him the look, the “you’re madder than a hatter and I can’t believe I’m doing this” look, he’s as game as they come. He gets it up even when he clearly thinks Sam is off his rocker, so yeah, it works for him, too… and he comes back. He shows up at odd hours of the morning, pounding the door in, sweating bullets and waving a bottle of scotch. Sam’s pulse quickens, because he knows it’s going to be a great night and he’ll wake up feeling fresh, new, wrung out and knocked about, but so very very alive.

Everything about 1973 seems to contribute to this feeling, from the acrid bite of cigarette smoke in his throat to the scrub of the fabrics against his skin, to the open animosity that slowly evolves into a feeling of comradeship, to the way that Annie misinterprets almost everything he says to her. She’s a woman of her time, but she’s got her finger on his pulse and he glories, actually, in how much he can’t habituate to it.

He doesn’t love gay sex, but he loves the way it can make him feel. And Christ, if he doesn’t love 1973.

  



End file.
